Samsø cuts the cord

Journalists walk past wind turbines on Samsø Island Sunday 13 December. The island claims to be the first in Denmark to be 100  percent renewable-energy powered, generating more than 140 percent of the power it needs with wind, solar and biomass. Photo © Frosina Pandurska Drmikanin

14 December 2009

The lights always go on in Samsø, the houses remain warm and cozy against the dark Scandinavian winters, the wind almost always blows. But the real secret behind the island's energy independence? The people.

By Douglas Fischer
Daily Climate Editor

NORDBY, Denmark –  U.S. Energy Secretary Steve Chu and a host of foreign energy ministers announced Monday a $350 million initiative aimed at boosting renewable technologies worldwide. But out here on windswept Samsø, a remote, rural island in Denmark, resident have already transited to the carbon-free world these ministers envision.

They did so without the new technology or fancy investments envisioned by the ministers. Their secret? The residents themselves. And their desire to make a buck.

Twelve years ago Samsø set out on an ambitious experiment to become a 100-percent renewable-energy-powered island. There's nothing very different about the place, at least by Danish standards, from any other rural community: bucolic pastures grazed by sturdy Icelandic horses, tidy towns, a strong conservative rural tradition.

In Denmark, in fact, the place is known chiefly for its potatoes; without renewable fuels, the place would be just another European farming community, Danes say. But it has stepped successfully into the 21st century.

It did so by developing a diverse energy portfolio and giving the power quite literally to the people.

"You have to know the right way to people's decisions," said Jasper Kjerns, who lives on the island and works for Samsø Energi Akademi, which coordinates the island's energy policies. "If you ask some of the people – some of the farmers – maybe they say, 'I don't believe in global warming. But this is a good investment.' "

Eleven turbines meet the island's electricity needs. Community heating systems, powered by straw, wood chips and sun, provide hot water and heating for 70 percent of the island's 4,100 residents.

Transportation fuels, calm days and a few isolated oil-powered furnaces remain the tough nuts left to crack: The ferry – the only way off the island – still runs on diesel, as do most cars. When the winds stop, islanders need to "borrow" juice from the mainland grid to brew some tea.

But Samsø has installed a bank of offshore turbines to offset such fossil-fuel use, shipping excess power back to the grid. The result is that now the island taps renewable fuels to generate 140 percent of the energy it needs.

And that's good business.

Farmers sell straw to one of the island's four biomass plants. One of those plants is owned by 200 residents. One of the 1-megawatt turbines is owned by a partnership of 450 locals. The local municipality owns five turbines, other families have shares in various endeavors generating modest annual dividends (enough, one jokester quipped, for a flight to Thailand).

The Samsø experiment is part of a larger shift away from foreign fuels, sparked by the 1973 OPEC oil embargo, that is now bearing fruit throughout Denmark, Scandinavia and parts of Northern Europe.

The success, many say, is due not to technological breakthroughs but political ones – quite different from the research-heavy roadmap laid out by Chu and the ministers at the United Nations climate talks in Copenhagen.

The new five-year program, dubbed Climate REDI, aims to boost investment in a broad range of innovations, from distributing solar-powered lamps to the poor to developing liquid-metal batteries mighty enough to power buildings. The program's goal is to make off-the-shelf energy-saving technology cheaper while also encouraging research and development.

"There is a very large gap in these goals of what we need to do and where we need to go," Chu told a packed briefing room.

But technology isn't blocking progress in the United States, cautioned Rhone Resch, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association, representing the U.S. solar industry.

"It's the political framework entirely," he said. "The technologies that we need are ready to go. But the political networks are not there."

Hawaii, for instance, is not that different from Samsø a decade ago – remote, somewhat rural, and dependent entirely on oil. But Hawaii's leaders have decided to change that – aiming to install enough solar to generate 30 percent of the state's electrical needs and requiring all new water heaters to be solar-powered.

"You're driving the demand by showing clear political leadership," Resch said.

Across the country, Rhode Island's Block Island is moving in reverse: It has onerous rules about who can install solar panels and doesn't facilitate connections to the grid, Resch said. The result is that soon electricity will be cheaper in Hawaii, even though much of the technology Hawaii is using is manufactured in nearby Massachusetts.

Denmark's energy picture also shows the power of politics. The Scandinavian country has a long tradition of cooperative ventures and consensus politics. Its parliament runs on a consensus basis; most small villages have a cooperative dairy. District heating is de rigeuer.

Indeed, whereas a traditional coal-fired plant in the United States dumps excess heat into a river or runs it through cooling towers, Copenhagen and its environs heats 60 million square meters of floors with a system powered by household and industrial waste and co-generating plants that also provide electricity. Those plants heats water and pump it through a closed loop that includes thousands of kilometers of insulated pipe. It connects 98 percent of the buildings in the city, said Anders Dyrelund, market manager for Rambøll Group, an energy consultant.

The system keeps more than one million people toasty.
It also is key to integrating various renewable energy sources. In the 1980s the city could not use all the heat from its waste incinerators, for instance. Now it can. Excess wind energy can be stored as heat. The same pipes in the floors cool buildings in the summer.

"You cannot do this with independent buildings," Dyrelund said.

Samsø shows this, too. Mostly summer homes dot Nordby, on the northern end of the island. Accordingly, the town installed two heating systems: solar and wood chips. The summer sun meets most of the town's heating and hot water needs; the wood-chip burner next to the solar panels handles demand during the winter.

"The turbines you'll find anywhere in Denmark. The district heating you'll find anywhere in Denmark," Kjerns said. "The thing unique in Samsø is you have made people the owners of the project."

And that's perhaps the real lesson from Samsø. Transformative change isn't so much about new technology, Kjerns said – the island, for instance, is still waiting for electric cars to go mainstream – as it is about shifting the conversation.

"We think local and we act local," Kjerns said. "We do this not to save polar bears. We do this to save Samsø."

Contact Daily Climate editor Douglas Fischer at dfischer [ at ] dailyclimate.org

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